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The true brew

Australian coffee drinkers are embracing new tastes,
writes Leanne Tolra.

THE tour-bus passengers are on a high - animated by a crisp,
clean caffeine hit. "I've never tasted anything like it," says one.
"I don't normally like black coffee," says another heading out the
door, "but that was amazing."

A third trailing behind marvels at the "fruity and smooth"
flavour lingering on her palate: "It was almost like a glass of
wine."

Exit St Ali, one of Melbourne's modern boutique roasters, and
this small sip of La Montana (winner of the 2007 El Salvador Cup of
Excellence) has opened the way to a new world of coffee drinking
for a busload of already passionate foodies.

They're part of Allan Campion's Melbourne Food Tours. It's a
Saturday morning in April and 24 participants from suburban
Melbourne, regional Victoria, NSW, Tasmania and New Zealand are on
the road for the day to experience Melbourne's gastronomic
bounty.

Campion, a chef, food writer and cookbook author, selects St Ali
to show his tour groups the city's growing number of boutique
roasters who are doing more with coffee than serving prettily
etched cafe lattes.

Selling single-variety and single-origin coffee isn't new - some
of Melbourne's leading roasters have been doing it for more than 20
years. But in recent years they've been joined by boutique cafe
owners roasting their own green beans and boosting coffee drinkers'
appreciation of taste according to region, variety and growing
conditions. The comparisons with wine, wine tasting and wine
marketing are inevitable.

Over at The First Pour in Abbotsford, Peter Wolff, president of
the AustralAsian Specialty Coffee Association, has been running
coffee-tasting courses and conducting experiments using Riedel
specialty wine glasses.

"We wanted to find out whether the glasses did the same thing
for coffee as they do for wine, in terms of flavour delivery on the
mouth. And we found there were some differences to drinking out of
a normal ceramic cup. There are some issues - the glass is too hot
to hold and it cools too quickly, but it certainly gets you
thinking."

The Coffee Academy at William Angliss Institute ran its first
Palate Training for Coffee Drinkers course during the Melbourne
Food and Wine Festival earlier this year. Academy manager Jill
Adams enrolled in a wine-tasting course at La Trobe University to
develop her own palate "because the coffee industry offers nothing
like that".

"I was so impressed by what it taught me that I felt we needed
to offer something similar for the coffee industry. It made me see
that there is a science behind what we are tasting."

Adams approached the university's Lindsay Corby, a master of
wine and wine appreciation, to run the academy's course and
challenge coffee industry professionals' perceptions of what they
were drinking (see story right).

Corby says the way to increased markets and understanding of
coffee is in educating coffee drinkers that there is a huge
difference between good coffee and bad, and in teaching industry
professionals to learn to recognise bad coffee from its source.
"Where and how it was grown? Did the green bean have transport
problems? How was it stored and roasted? This all matters, long
before the coffee is finally presented in the cup as a filter
coffee or an espresso," he says.

Corby says there are many similarities between the wine and
coffee industries in terms of marketing and education, but that
much of the wine industry's success has come from its technical
base and its willingness to co-operate. "We are not sharing next
week's secrets, but we are sharing last week's," he says.

Wine marketing expert Professor Larry Lockshin from the
University of South Australia says the Australian coffee industry
doesn't have the financial clout, the history or the production
volumes to market coffee like wine. Australia produces about 600
tonnes of coffee annually and imports more than 40,500 tonnes.
Brazil, the world's largest coffee producer, grows an average of 3
million tonnes a year.

He says the bulk of the wine industry's promotion is funded by
wine-marketing companies. And in the coffee industry "it's not the
growers who will be funding the promotions, it's got to be the
importers, the distributors and the roasters grouping
together".

The specialty coffee industry is making headway, says Wolff.
Northern-hemisphere specialty coffee markets have traditionally
been tough for Australian importers but coffee grown in Indonesia,
Papua New Guinea or Java is more accessible. "We are seeing
roasters going directly to the farmers in these areas for coffee,"
he says.

Wolff is upbeat about the trend to expand the market at its top
end: "Some of the leading cafes in every major capital city are
really pushing specialty coffee and putting it directly in front of
the consumer and saying, 'Here, try this coffee it's a Rwandan
Golden Cup of Excellence coffee, this coffee is
extraordinary'."

For Australian growers, this is a double-edged sword. Growing
consumer interest in locally produced coffee is positive but there
are better returns to be made from selling it overseas, says
president of the Australian Coffee Growers Association Ian
McLaughlin.

"It is a very hard thing for us as growers to connect with
consumers. Mostly, our sales are made through brokers," he
says.

Australia grows about 750 hectares of coffee in parts of
Queensland and NSW. About one-third of the coffee grown in
Australia is exported. McLaughlin says Australian green (unroasted)
coffee sells for about $10 a kilo, which compares with average
world coffee prices of $3 a kilo: "But to make the industry viable
I think we need to make $30 a kilogram.''

Two years ago, he built a $4 million restaurant at his
plantation in northern Queensland, "so I could serve and display my
coffee at its best and lift the price of it to where it needs to
be".

"A lot of people come into the coffee business because of the
romance associated with coffee. But there has to be a way for them
to make their businesses cost effective," he says.

That's exactly what Andrew Ford, owner of Mountain Top Estate, a
coffee plantation in northern NSW, did. His is the country's
highest-priced green coffee, selling for more than $20 a kilo.

Four years ago, Ford took his coffee to the "micro spec" of the
world market that would pay a premium. "But if I had gone to the
Australian roasters without the international buyer paying a
premium, they would not have paid for it.

"The consuming public is absolutely ready to pay a premium for
high-value coffee,'' says Ford. ''It's evident in our attitude to
wine, olive oil and vinegars.''

Australia's national coffee competitions were held in Melbourne
earlier this month. David Makin (Victoria), our barista champion,
Habib Maarbani (NSW), our cafe latte artist and Catherine Ferrari
(WA), our coffee cupping (tasting) champion, will all compete at
the world titles in Copenhagen in June.

To win, Ferrari, a third-generation coffee professional (her
grandfather began roasting coffee beans in 1936), tasted her way
through 24 cups of coffee.

"Coffee, like wine, is very personal," she says. "It's not just
about taste; it's about colour and aroma and viscosity.

''With wine, consumers are confident of their ability to say
what they like and what they don't, and they are not necessarily
loyal to a label.

"But people tend to be brand loyal with their coffee," she
says.

Ferrari says it is time to break away from that and try new
things.

Words that work

"You can't have sweet acidity," Erika Winter says. "And what is
funky forest floor?" These are words and phrases that coffee
roasters and tasters commonly use to describe coffee flavours, but
Winter, co-author of Winegrape Berry Sensory Assessment in
Australia - a tasting "vocabulary" for grapes - says the coffee
industry needs its own official language.

"We have taught growers and winemakers to use the same language.
What we have done for grapes is so transferable to coffee,'' she
says.

''A number of international organisations have lists of
descriptors but these are used as descriptive terms and the
language is still subjective.''

The flavour of a coffee brew

AROMAS

Ashy

An odour descriptor similar to the smell of an ashtray, smokers'
fingers or the smell one gets when cleaning out a fireplace. But it
is not used as a negative attribute. Generally speaking, it
indicates the degree of roast.

Chocolate-like

An aroma and flavour of cocoa powder and chocolate (including
dark chocolate and milk chocolate), sometimes referred to as
sweet.

TASTES

Acidity

A basic taste characterised by the solution of an organic acid.
A desirable sharp and pleasing taste particularly strong with
certain origins as opposed to an overfermented sour taste.

Sweetness

For coffee characterised by solutions of sucrose or fructose,
commonly associated with sweet aroma descriptors such as fruity,
chocolate and caramel. It is generally used for describing coffees
which are free from off-flavours.

MOUTHFEEL

Body

This attribute descriptor is used to describe the physical
properties of the beverage. A strong but pleasant full mouthfeel
characteristic as opposed to being thin.

Astringency

Leaving an aftertaste sensation like a dry feeling in the mouth,
undesirable in coffee.